ONTARIO TONITE. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, WEDNESDAY 28 SEPTEMBER 2022. Andrew Cohen is “a journalist, professor of journalism at Carleton University and the author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History” (and The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are). Back in the middle of June last […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, FROM THE EAST TORONTO OFFICE (NORTH OF THE LAKES AS THE OLD AGRARIAN DEMOCRACY USED TO SAY). JUNE 24, 2021. The weather is more than just agreeable here today. The sun is shining. Early summer is in full bloom. And we are cheered, dismayed, and/or puzzled by eight different stories in the recent […]

EMAIL FROM CITIZEN X, OLD SANDY COVE, ON : Marie-Danielle Smith at Maclean’s has published two different accounts of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unusual appearance before the Finance Committee of the Canadian House of Commons yesterday. One – the more drearily conventional (and overly rhetorical) – is called : “Three key takeaways from Justin Trudeau’s […]

Andrew Cohen’s “Why Canada’s response to COVID-19 is so different from that of the US,” from the Ottawa Citizen this past week, won applause from many Canadians. Zach Carter’s “Coronavirus Is A Defining Test And American Government Is Failing It … It’s not just Trump. Our politics are unfit for this calamity,” from Huffington Post, […]

From a Canadian point of view, it probably does make some kind of sense that, as the Queen has recently informed us, Harry and Meghan will be going through “a period of transition in which” they “will spend time in Canada and the UK.” As suggested by Philippe Lagassé, described in the New York Times […]

Our apologies to all and any who may have visited us over the past week or so, and found we had temporarily vanished from the world wide web. The long and short is that the site just suddenly crashed, not long after our April 3, 2019 post on “Time for a change : our latest […]

We have two main objectives in this short note on the latest episodes in what the Montreal Gazette has nicely called “Canada’s SNC melodrama.” The first is to offer gratitude and praise to the rafters for Andrew Cohen’s recent opinion piece : “Canada’s SNC melodrama baffles a world facing real crisis … ‘To our allies, […]

The text for this Monday morning is Tim Harper’s piece in the Toronto Star, Friday, January 15, 2016 : “Why is our nation’s capital so drab? … On the eve of our 150th anniversary, it’s time to pierce Ottawa’s torpor and begin to showcase our capital.” Mr. Harper’s piece is in turn a response to […]